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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26796493">the dead will eat their fill</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dridri93/pseuds/dridri93'>dridri93</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Clone-tober 2020 [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Clone Trooper Culture (Star Wars), Fix-It, Force-Sensitive Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Gen, Ghosts, Light horror themes, Mild Blood, No Zombies Appear In This Fic, Post-Episode: s06e04 Orders</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:08:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,417</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26796493</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dridri93/pseuds/dridri93</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The blood of a brother stains Fox's hands, even if only some of his brothers can see it. He knows what he must do to lay the unquiet soul of ARC trooper Fives to rest.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>CT-27-5555 | Fives | ARC-5555 &amp; CC-1010 | Fox</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Clone-tober 2020 [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948393</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>91</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>the dead will eat their fill</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was supposed to be angst, took a turn into horror, and then arrived fully-formed as a fix-it. Such is the life of a writer. I'd already had this started before I finished it for today, which is why it's so much longer. It also has a great deal of worldbuilding of a different kind of clone culture, found in the footnotes.</p>
<p>The Clone-tober prompt for Day 3 was <em>Fox+Haunt</em>.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Fox always knows where the Kyrame<a href="#_ftn1" id="_ftnref1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> lurk. The unquiet dead line the Coruscanti streets, faceless, shuffling along with the masses like just another citizen except for the ghostly pallor in the corners of his eyes and the way others walk through them.</p>
<p>Two years on and Fox now catches flashes of death-pallid white and Guard red in the corners of his eyes and has to look away.</p>
<p>To look at his unquiet vode is to acknowledge that he has a duty to carry them on. It’s why, as near as he and the other <strike>cursed</strike> vode with his <em>gift</em> can tell, they can see the Kyrame at all. To send them forward into the waves to sink away into the quiet deeps. The first time Fox carried an unquiet vod across his back to Haar Sho’cye<a href="#_ftn2" id="_ftnref2" name="_ftnref2">[2]</a>, into the quiet waves, he woke feeling like he’d just run a hundred laps around the entire Tipoca facility with no water.</p>
<p>It had been two days. His squad had covered for him, convinced a medic to fudge records for a minor sprain and assigned bedrest.</p>
<p>Fox knew he would do it again.</p>
<p>And now, Fox knows what he has to do. The blood of a vod stains his hands, even now, even if his nehaa’ityc vode<a href="#_ftn3" id="_ftnref3" name="_ftnref3">[3]</a> can’t see it. He knows it’s not a hallucination because Wolffe did a double-take when they met at 79’s last night, Fox out of his shell and in a cover to try and be invisible and Wolffe as obtrusive as ever.</p>
<p>
  <em>“You see it too?”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Kriff, Fox, your hands…”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“Are dripping. I am </em>aware<em>, Wolffe. You think I could ignore this?”</em></p>
<p>
  <em>“You ignore so much else.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Wolffe...”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“I don’t know how you stay on this karking planet. The Kyrame are everywhere, Fox, a girl with a hole in her head is staring me down across the kriffing </em>bar<em> right now, how do you do it?”</em></p>
<p>
  <em>“…Practice.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“Kh, if you say so.”</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>…</em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>“You’ll have to get that off.”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“Again, I am </em>aware<em>, Commander. If you’re just going to tell me what I already </em>know<em>–”</em></p>
<p>
  <em>“He won’t rest unless it’s you.”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“Enough with the </em>karking<em> opinions, Commander Obvious, I know all of this! What, you think </em>I<em> don’t know what I’m doing by now? After ten bloody, wave-damned years?”</em></p>
<p>
  <em>“Storms save it, Fox, that’s not what–”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“Shut that jaw before I hit it, I am </em>done<em> listening to everyone telling me what I already know. I just wanted a drink to wash the blood off my teeth, shabuir<a href="#_ftn4" id="_ftnref4" name="_ftnref4"><strong>[4]</strong></a>.”</em></p>
<p>
  <em>“…You know it won’t work.”</em>
</p>
<p><em>“I can </em>try<em>.”</em></p>
<p>He’d tried. Wolffe had been right. He can still taste it, metal-bitter under his tongue even under the hangover fuzz (or stronger because of it; he can’t tell).</p>
<p>Fox lies on his bunk, feeling his head pound like artillery fire and tasting the blood of a brother unquietly dead at his hands, and wishes he had any other option.</p>
<p>But he’s pretty sure that if he doesn’t go back to that warehouse, back to where he left the waves churned and his brother dead-but-not-gone, Ryn will try to go for him. The kid has always taken on more burdens than he deserved, and he’s been eyeing Fox’s forearms – obviously dripping, to any haa’ityc vode<a href="#_ftn5" id="_ftnref5" name="_ftnref5">[5]</a> – with a bitter determination of late.</p>
<p>Fox won’t let a vod he’s responsible for be dragged under the waves by a ghost he’d left in shame.</p>
<p>He levers himself upright with a broken grunt, his head swimming. He lets the Sho’cye wash over him for a short second, feeling the pain fall away, but not for long enough to take it all. (He doesn’t deserve relief.) He straightens with more alacrity, stripping off his sweat-sour greys and slipping into a fresh set of blacks without a thought.</p>
<p>He has a warehouse to find.</p><hr/>
<p>He barely remembers to comm Thire to warn the other commander that he’d be taking a self-assigned solo assignment for the day. Thire makes a questioning noise but subsides when Fox mutters, “Be’kyram<a href="#_ftn6" id="_ftnref6" name="_ftnref6">[6]</a>.” Thire knows enough to give Fox a day before tracking his comm. That will have to be enough.</p>
<p>Fox doesn’t consider that tomorrow Thire could be tracking his comm to his body, empty of what soul a vod has, dragged onto the waves to drift until a different Haa’ityc vod comes along, if they deem his damned soul worthy.</p>
<p>He’s never heard of it happening, but something in him simply knows that it could.</p>
<p>It takes an eternity and no time at all to find the warehouse. It still smells vaguely of tibanna and seared flesh. But the ghost whose blood he wears is nowhere to be found. The dark of the warehouse looms over him and even the waves of the Sho’cye still, too-calm in the windless front before a storm.</p>
<p>He steps further in, his boots echoing on the duracrete floor. The lights around him flick on, motion-activated (he thinks), every other light broken. Islands of bright illumination just make his visibility worse, washing out his HUD’s night vision and deepening the shadows in his normal view.</p>
<p>He dips to feel the Sho’cye one more time and gets the sense of something <em>waiting</em> just under the waves. Watching.</p>
<p>Not hungry. Not yet. But the potential is there in the way the feeling of a shadow passing under-around him washes through his mind.</p>
<p>“Fives?” he manages, his voice hoarse and too loud in the encompassing stillness.</p>
<p>The intangible waves ripple around him and he sees movement deep in the shadows, behind the ring of light where he watched a brother die. He tries to focus on that spot of movement and see nothing else, just the deep darkness that feels like eyes trained on his back through a scope.</p>
<p>“Fives,” he tries again, his voice more level and quieter, “You know why I’m here.”</p>
<p>Nothing.</p>
<p>Stillness falls around him again, artificial, like waiting in a sniper’s blind. Fox knows in that moment that while he operates on a set timeframe – his body will need sustenance, and sleep, and all the messy bits of living – the Kyrame can wait until eternity expires. Fives can wait him out, leave him with dripping hands and too many questions.</p>
<p>He steps into the puddle of light, avoiding the dark spot where Fives fell and allowing the light to drown his eyes until he can see nothing but vague shapes. He settles, sitting on the ground uncomfortably. Trying to show that he’s not intending to leave until he can say his piece. He faces the place he saw movement in the shadows and waits.</p>
<p>Another shift in the darkness, even harder to pick out – the right height for a vod, at least. “I owe you a lifedebt,” he finally says into the stillness, Mando’a falling ritualistic from his tongue. “I’ve come so you can collect, if you wish.”</p>
<p>The figure slips into the light, gaining its own luminescence as it comes toward him – Fives, still in the blank shiny whites, still shaved with a wound on his head. Still shifting with anxiety, still wild-eyed.</p>
<p>Fox breathes in his shock, lets the waves wash it away. The debt he’s offered will be taken, one way or another. Thire will take his place if they find his cooling, soulless body here in twenty-four hours. He can’t let this debt remain on his conscience, can’t let his hands stay dripping the blood of his brother.</p>
<p>“You owe me more than a lifedebt,” Fives hisses, face slipping to a deathmask and back, sneer sliding onto his face like a shadow. “You may have doomed all of our brothers.”</p>
<p>Fox doesn’t ask <em>why</em>, doesn’t want to unsettle Fives in that way. It’s what he believed in life, so he believes it in death.</p>
<p>Fives’ shade sneers at him again as he settles across from Fox, no discomfort like what Fox deals with. “Not going to ask?” he challenges. “Not going to ask why?”</p>
<p>Fox tries to float on the waves growing choppier by the second, let himself rise above them. “Does it matter?” he asks, trying to keep a level head and keep the conversation calm, and instantly regrets it.</p>
<p>Fives’ shade was sitting, but then it is standing – <em>looming</em> over Fox’s seated form, the Sho’cye lashing him like the worst of Kamino’s storms, needle-sharp and accusatory. “<em>Of course</em> it matters!” Fives growls. “I<em> died</em> for this, was <em>killed</em> by <em>you</em> for what I learned, and you have the balls to ask if it <em>mattered</em>? Tell me, <em>Commander</em>, does my record show a tendency to act on things that don’t <em>matter</em>?”</p>
<p>Fox tries to calm his breathing and feels himself a step to the left of his lungs, his body. Not good, he knows instinctively. <em>Very</em> not good. “No,” he says, quiet into the thrashing of the Sho’cye around him.</p>
<p>Fives subsides, fades back into the shadows, and Fox still can’t draw breath. He looks down at his own chest and sees double – sees a bloody mess of a blacks-covered chest just outside of the armor he’d thrown on before he left the barracks.</p>
<p><em>Kark</em>.</p>
<p>His body – that’s what it is now, just a shell – collapses onto the floor in a mimicry of Fives’ final moments, chest still moving up-and-down for the moment. But he is alone, except for the shade he can sense just beyond the light. No one cries beside the shell he’s left behind. No one will. He tries to find fear, tries to find the anger that he thought he’d feel at dying, and finds only the smooth waves of the Sho’cye lapping at his ankles. Beckoning. He resists their call and gives up finding fear for lost. He still has a debt to pay, a last soul to bear under the waves.</p>
<p>He turns and can see, the lack of light no longer a barrier. Fives stands beside the crate where Captain Rex’s pistols had lain, where Fives had made his ill-fated stand. Fox tries to look down at his own spirit and only sees blood.</p>
<p>His is a marred soul, a brother-killer.</p>
<p>Fives chokes on something – not a breath, nothing corporeal, but he stutters, “Comm – <em>Fox</em>?” Fives approaches again, eyes wide. “Storms take us, Fox,” he says, “what <em>happened</em> to you?”</p>
<p>“I killed my brother,” he says, humorless. It’s what he deserves. A permanent mark on his soul.</p>
<p>Fivs shakes his head. “No, no,” he says. “I’ve seen brothers who’ve killed brothers, and their souls were <em>fine</em>. Yours is. <em>Storms</em>, Fox, you look like you’ve been flayed.”</p>
<p>What? Fox looks down and sees nothing odd – still his own bloody, dripping hands, if incorporeal now. “What?” he asks.</p>
<p>Fives looks at him, eyes sharp as any ARC trooper Fox has met. Sharper. “Your soul, Fox,” he says, almost gentle, “looks leagues worse than the guiltiest trooper fresh off Umbara I helped on.”</p>
<p>Fox shakes his head. This can’t be anything but penance for his crime – what else could it <em>be</em>? It’s not like he’s ever seen this before, and surely nothing can flay a soul still in a body –</p>
<p>“How much time do you spend around the Chancellor?” Fives blurts, out of the blue.</p>
<p>Fox can’t blink, but he hopes his nonplussed face is as effective as it is in his physical body. He doesn’t dare ask <em>Does it matter</em>, not with the way Fives reacted the last time he tried that tactic. Still, the tangent doesn’t make any sense.</p>
<p>Fives waits for a few seconds before seeming to realize that Fox can outlast him now. “I have a bad feeling about him,” Fives apparently tries to explain. As if that explanation works for anyone but a Jedi.</p>
<p>Fox raises an eyebrow.</p>
<p>“Will you hear me out?” Fives asks, form suddenly flickering as if through a bad holo connection. “Will you hear what I learned and <em>listen</em>?”</p>
<p>Fox pauses for a second and realizes – this may be what Fives <em>needs</em>, to move on. Someone to listen to him, even if he’s spouting conspiracy and thinly-veiled treason. It’s his duty.</p>
<p>And he admits that he’s curious, about what made it all worth it.</p>
<p>“I will,” he says, moving to sit. He doesn’t look at his body, still somehow breathing even if entirely limp and lifeless on the floor.</p>
<p>“<em>Thank you</em>,” Fives breathes, settling down himself. He appears to straighten his spine, eyes clear and serious.</p>
<p>And he explains. Fox hears it all – the actions of the trooper Tup, the <em>murder</em> of a <em>Jedi</em>, the trip to Kamino and the avoidance of the Kaminoans, the little med-droid that Fives smiles to recall, that story of a <em>chip</em> in trooper Tup’s <em>brain</em>. The discovery of an undamaged chip in <em>Fives’</em> head. The discovery of chips in <em>every tubie</em>. And then he hears Fives’ side of the events he’d been told by the Chancellor and can’t reconcile them, hears Fives describe the Chancellor himself as treasonous, as something that sent rogue waves into the Sho’cye, that summoned storms and darkened the waters.</p>
<p>He can’t believe it, on one level.</p>
<p>On another, it feels <em>true</em> and summons memories of oddities <em>he’d</em> noticed around the Chancellor.</p>
<p>He doesn’t want to believe it. This is the man he trusted to lead the Republic, even if he was corrupt and of the habit to pass of his paperwork to Fox.</p>
<p>But Fives’ eyes are clearer than they had been when Fox had seen them in life, and yet he still has the same story to tell.</p>
<p>“<em>Fuck</em>,” he breathes. It’s all he can manage.</p>
<p>Fives barks a laugh, desperation in the sound. “Yeah,” he agrees. “Fuck.”</p>
<p>Fox looks down at his still-bloody, still-incorporeal chest. “<em>Ni ceta<a href="#_ftn7" id="_ftnref7" name="_ftnref7"><strong>[7]</strong></a></em>,” he manages around the lump that’s somehow in his throat. His voice suddenly feels as ragged as his soul apparently is. He can’t stop, can only say, “Ni ceta, ni ceta, ni cet–”</p>
<p>Fives stops him with a raised hand and a sigh. “You were tricked,” he says. “With the state of your soul…”</p>
<p>Fox winces, then freezes when Fives continues, “…I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been influenced in some way. Made to obey. To be obedient.”</p>
<p>He can’t think for a split second – surely that wasn’t <em>possible</em>, but Fives had traveled more than him, had surely seen and heard more about the Force the Jedi used in much the same way he touched the Sho’cye. Maybe it was.</p>
<p>Storms, but he was karked if it was. If Fives was right, and the Chancellor was not only a traitor but a man able to shape others to his will, to… to <em>flay</em> a soul like Fox’s soul had apparently been flayed.</p>
<p>He blinks back to the present to find Fives watching him, form almost as solid as a body but half-faded away. Ready to be carried over. Fox had listened, had understood. Kark, but he’d <em>understood</em>. And now it’s time.</p>
<p>“Will you let me carry you?” Fox asks, stilted.</p>
<p>Fives nods, a smile stealing over his face, ARC pauldrons on his shoulders, broad and hale. “If you promise to surface again, so you can warn our brothers the way I failed to,” Fives says. It’s a promise Fox is happy to make, even if he’s not sure he can uphold it.</p>
<p>The waves still tug at his ankles. But he can resist. He must.</p>
<p>He nods, and Fives grins. Fox extends a hand. Fives takes it, and together they sink below the waves into the Sho’cye.</p>
<p>Quiet-yet-singing. Warm-yet-pleasantly-cool. Peace-yet-current, pulling onward. Fox can’t see Fives’ face anymore, but he releases the hand in his and feels Fives follow the current onward. He stills himself against the waves and throws his will into <em>emerging</em>, into <em>surfacing</em>, and breaks the surface to find himself back before his body.</p>
<p>It still breathes. Its eyes are closed.</p>
<p>He has no idea how to do this. But he promised, so he tries to sink back into his body, fit himself back into the shell he has lived inside for thirteen years. He lies back, into his body, feeling the solidness of it press against his soul, and tries to feel for how he <em>fits</em>.</p>
<p>Time passes. He doesn’t know how much. But he slowly feels himself sinking into the body he’s lying in. It feels like pins-and-needles in limbs he couldn’t shake to get the blood moving. Until he <em>can</em>, and the shake of his own thigh – his <em>corporeal</em> thigh – jolts him so much that something clicks and he sits up and hears the plastoid of his armor click in the silence of the warehouse.</p>
<p>He checks the chrono in his HUD and realizes he has less than half an hour before Thire sends out a squad to retrieve him. <em>Kark</em>, but it hadn’t felt like almost a day when he was outside of his own body.</p>
<p>His stomach growls, and he realizes that his throat clicks as he swallows because he’s <em>thirsty</em>. He snags a water-ration pouch out of his belt and sucks it down, chewing on a ration bar as he types out a stand-down to Thire.</p>
<p>He stands on shaky legs and the lights click on – must be activated by movement above a certain height. The sudden light leaves him blinking, but it feels nothing like it had when he’d first walked in. The empty warehouse is just a building, the Sho’cye calm but in motion with the baseline life of the city around him.</p>
<p>He walks out of the warehouse, rehearsing what he’d tell Thire, trying not to rub his temple through his bucket. He needs one of the medics to scan his kriffing brain, <em>prove</em> that Fives’ theories held water.</p>
<p>He has a promise to keep.</p><hr/>
<p>Rex finds him in his office a month later, after Thire has spread the word of <em>chips</em> through the secret channels all clone commanders had access to. Fox’s hands have been clean for half of that time, the blood drying and falling away as he allowed the Sho’cye to cover him around the Chancellor, wash away any attacks that tried to strike him.</p>
<p>How he hadn’t <em>noticed</em> those attacks before, Fox doesn’t know.</p>
<p>Rex glances at his clean hands and back up. “You paid your debt?” he asks, words quiet between them.</p>
<p>Fox nods. “Kyrame ru’epa luubid; ner ruyot cuyi ut’reeyah<a href="#_ftn8" id="_ftnref8" name="_ftnref8">[8]</a>,” he says, the ritual words rising from the back of his mind. <em>The dead ate their fill; my past is empty</em>. He has paid his debts, has fulfilled his promises. Has carried Fives’ knowledge, his findings, to as many commanders as the channels could reach. He’s heard rumbles that shipboard medics and what medics there are on the med stations are quietly removing every chip they can, commanders first.</p>
<p>He hopes it will be enough. The Sho’cye on Coruscant has grown choppy, disturbed, in the month since he carried Fives’ soul under. A storm brews on the horizon.</p>
<p>He and his brothers will weather it, as they weathered every storm before. They know, now, who to trust.</p><hr/>
<p><a href="#_ftnref1" id="_ftn1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> The Unquiet Dead (lit. the dead); the Quiet Dead are the Sho’Kyrame, the dead who are one with the Force/the waves (see footnote 2)</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref2" id="_ftn2" name="_ftn2">[2]</a> The Force, or The Ocean; The Vode don’t see the Force as Jedi do, as they were never trained as Jedi. Instead, the Force is an ocean like those of Kamino, into whose waves the quiet dead sink. The waves are thus a major part of their “swearing”, and they use the “waves” to bring succor where they have the control to.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref3" id="_ftn3" name="_ftn3">[3]</a> Lit. “A blind sibling”; a vod who cannot see the Kyrame, or one without the Force. Taken from “haa’it”, vision.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref4" id="_ftn4" name="_ftn4">[4]</a> Pretty much literally “motherfucker”. Strongest curse in the Mando’a book that isn’t an aspersion on one’s honor.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref5" id="_ftn5" name="_ftn5">[5]</a> Lit. “Seeing siblings”; vode who can see the Kyrame and have the Force. There are relatively few among the vode, but those who have the ability tend to gather together to support one another.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref6" id="_ftn6" name="_ftn6">[6]</a> “About/of the dead”. Short and sweet explanation.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref7" id="_ftn7" name="_ftn7">[7]</a> Lit. “I kneel” – The most groveling of Mando’a apologies, intended only for the most grievous of insults and actions.</p>
<p><a href="#_ftnref8" id="_ftn8" name="_ftn8">[8]</a> [Mostly] Lit. “The dead ate their fill; my past is empty”. Said to acknowledge one has paid their debts to the dead that haunt them. A ceremonial saying, almost – hence the archaic construction – and one with weight. Not said unless it’s meant. Not quite <em>cin vhetin</em> (blank slate); this acknowledges the hole that is left and the wound still healing.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Let me know if those footnotes don't work for you... I let the rich-text editor take my footnotes from Word and it seems to have gone okay.</p>
<p>Leave a comment and/or a kudos if you enjoyed! I had a lot of fun building a whole new clone culture from the waves up, as it were, and a couple bits didn't make the cut to get included. Find me on Tumblr at medic-kix if you want to know more!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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